Everything about Operation Pastorius totally explained
Operation Pastorius was a failed plan for a
sabotage in series of attacks by
Nazi German agents inside the
United States. The operation was staged in June
1942 and was to be directed against strategic U.S. economic targets. The operation was named by Admiral
Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the German
Abwehr, for
Francis Daniel Pastorius, the leader of the first organized settlement of Germans in America.
Agents
Recruited for the operation were eight Germans who had lived in the United States. Two of them, Ernest Burger and
Herbert Haupt, were American citizens. The others,
George John Dasch, Edward John Kerling, Richard Quirin, Heinrich Harm Heinck, Hermann Otto Neubauer and Werner Thiel, had worked at various jobs in the United States.
Mission
Their mission was to stage sabotage attacks on American economic targets: hydro-electric plants at
Niagara Falls; the
Aluminum Company of America's plants in
Illinois,
Tennessee and
New York; locks on the
Ohio River near
Louisville, Kentucky; the
Horseshoe Curve, a crucial railroad pass near
Altoona, Pennsylvania, as well as the
Pennsylvania Railroad's repair shops at Altoona ; a
cryolite plant in
Philadelphia;
Hell Gate Bridge in New York; and
Pennsylvania Station in
Newark, New Jersey. They were given a quick course in
sabotage techniques, given nearly $175,000 in American money and put aboard two
submarines to land on the east coast of the
United States.
On June 13, 1942, the first submarine (U-202 the
Innsbruck) landed in
Amagansett, New York. This is about 115 miles east of
New York City, on
Long Island, at what today is Atlantic Avenue beach. It was carrying George Dasch, who was the head of the team, and three other saboteurs (Burger, Quirin, and Henck). The team came ashore wearing military uniforms so that if they were captured they'd be classified as prisoners of war rather than spies. They also brought ashore, and buried, enough explosives, primers, and incendiaries to support an expected two-year career in the sabotage of American defense-related production. The group hadn't fully changed into civilian clothes when an unarmed
Coast Guardsman, John C. Cullen, spotted the Germans. One of them tried to bribe him. Cullen, however, returned to his station and reported the encounter to his superiors. By that time the Germans, weary from their transatlantic trip, had taken a train into New York City.
The second submarine,
U-584
, with the other four-member team headed by Kerling, landed at
Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, south of
Jacksonville on June 16, 1942. Without any incident, this second group of Germans started their mission by boarding trains to
Chicago and
Cincinnati.
Arrest and trial
Two of the Germans in New York, Dasch and Burger, decided to back out of the mission. Dasch went to
Washington, D.C., and turned himself in to the
Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was dismissed as a crackpot by numerous agents, until he finally dumped his mission's entire budget of $84,000 on the desk of Assistant Director D.M. Ladd. At this point the defection was taken seriously and Dasch was interrogated for hours. None of the others knew of the betrayal. Over the next two weeks, Burger and the other six were arrested, and all eight were put on trial before a seven-member
military commission on specific instructions from President
Franklin D. Roosevelt. They were charged with
1) violating the law of war; 2) violating Article 81 of the
Articles of War, defining the offense of corresponding with or giving intelligence to the enemy; 3) violating Article 82 of the Articles of War, defining the offense of spying; and 4) conspiracy to commit the offenses alleged in the first three charges.
Lawyers for the accused, who included
Lauson Stone and
Kenneth Royall, attempted to have the case tried in a civilian court, but were rebuffed by the
Supreme Court in
Ex parte Quirin. The trial was held in the
Department of Justice building in Washington. All eight defendants were found guilty and sentenced to death. Roosevelt commuted Burger's sentence to life and Dasch's to 30 years, because they'd turned themselves in and provided information about the others. The others were executed on
August 8, in the
electric chair on the third floor of the
District of Columbia jail and buried in a
potter's field called Blue Plains in the
Anacostia area of Washington. In
1948, President
Harry S. Truman granted executive clemency to Dasch and Burger on the condition that they be deported to the
American Zone of occupied Germany.
Photographs of targets
Image:Hellgate_Bridge_Astoria_Park.jpg|Hell Gate Bridge New York City, New York
Image:Usgs_photo_horseshoe_bend_pennsylvania.jpg|Horseshoe Curve Altoona, Pennsylvania
Image:P7140087.JPG|Pennsylvania Station in Newark, New Jersey
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